In the past year, because Google cracked down hard on low quality links, the potential damage from 301 mistakes increased dramatically. There's also evidence that Google has slightly changed how they handle non-relevant redirects, which makes proper implementation more important than ever.

Semantic relevance 101: anatomy of a "perfect" redirect

A
perfect 301 redirect works as a simple “change of address” for your
content. Ideally, this means everything about the page except the URL
stays the same including content, title tag, images, and layout.

When
done properly, we know from testing and statements from Google that a
301 redirect passes somewhere around 85% of its original link equity.

The
new page doesn’t have to be a perfect match for the 301 to pass equity,
but problems arise when webmasters use the 301 to redirect visitors to
non-relevant pages. The further away you get from semantically relevant
content, the less likely your redirect will pass maximum link equity.

For
example, if you have a page about “labrador,” then redirecting to a page
about “dogs” makes sense, but redirecting to a page about
“tacos” does not.

A clue to this devaluation comes from the manner in which search engines deal with content that changes significantly over a period of time.

The famous Google patent, Information retrieval based on historical data, explains how older links might be ignored if the text of a page changes significantly or the anchor text pointing to a URL changes in a big way (I added the bold):

...the domain may show up in search results for queries that are no longer on topic. This is an undesirable result.
One way to address this problem is to estimate the date that a domain changed its focus. This may be done by determining a date when the text of a document changes significantly or when the text of the anchor text changes significantly. All links and/or anchor text prior to that date may then be ignored or discounted.

If these same properties apply to 301 redirects, it goes a long way in explaining why non-relevant pages don't get a boost from redirecting off-topic pages.

301 redirecting everything to the home page

Savvy
SEOs have known for a long time that redirecting a huge number of pages
to a home page isn’t the best policy, even when using a 301. Recent statements by Google representatives suggest that Google may go a step
further and treat bulk redirects to the home page of a website as 404s,
or soft 404s at best.

This
means that instead of passing link equity through the 301, Google may
simply drop the old URLs from its index without passing any link equity
at all.

While
it’s difficult to prove exactly how search engines handle mass home page
redirects, it’s fair to say that any time you 301 a large number of
pages to a single questionably relevant URL, you shouldn’t expect those
redirects to significantly boost your SEO efforts.

Better alternative: When necessary, redirect relevant pages to closely related URLs. Category pages are better than a general homepage.

If
the page is no longer relevant, receives little traffic, and a better
page does not exist, it’s often perfectly okay to serve a 404 or 410
status code.

Danger: 301 redirects and bad backlinks

Before
Penguin, SEOs widely believed that bad links couldn’t hurt you, and
redirecting entire domains with bad links wasn’t likely to have much of
an effect.

Then Google dropped the hammer on low-quality links.

If the Penguin update and developments of the past year have taught us anything, it’s this:

When you redirect a domain, its bad backlinks go with it.

Webmasters
often roll up several older domains into a single website, not
realizing that bad backlinks may harbor poison that sickens the entire
effort. If you’ve been penalized or suffered from low-quality backlinks,
it’s often easier and more effective to simply stop the redirect than to try and clean up individual links.

Individual URLs with bad links

The
same concept works at the individual URL level. If you redirect
a single URL with bad backlinks attached to it, those bad links will then point to your new URL.

In this case, it’s often better to simply drop the page with a 404 or 410, and let those links drop from the index.

Infinite loops and long chains

If
you perform an SEO audit on a site, you’ll hopefully discover any
potentially harmful redirect loops or crawling errors caused by
overly-complex redirect patterns.

While
it’s generally believed that Google will follow many, many redirects,
each step has the potential to diminish link equity, dilute anchor text
relevance, and lead to crawling and indexing errors.

One or two steps is generally the most you want out of any redirect chain.

New changes for 302s

SEOs typically hate 302s, but recent evidence suggests search engines may now be changing how they handle them — at least a little.

Google knows that webmasters make mistakes, and recent
tests by Geoff Kenyon showed that 302 redirects have potential to pass link equity. The theory is that 302s (meant to be temporary) are so
often implemented incorrectly, that Google treats them as “soft” 301s.

Hey Cyrus nice
guide on redirects. I will give the best example of proper redirects in
nowadays Seomoz to Moz. They have redirected their whole website and blog to a
new URL and they have done it in a proper manner. Hey guys what you think about this
redirect of Seomoz to Moz?

Moz is going to provide insight into the effect of the move in a post or other medium soonish: "p.s. We'll be sure to do an interesting case study on the impact this domain migration has on our search traffic. :-)". I'm definitely interested in seeing the case study.

Our Inbound Marketing Lead, Ruth Burr, is giving a Mozinar about this very topic! Reserve your spot to hear about how our migration affected our search traffic, the inbound planning that went into the transition, and the results we've seen so far.

Ah, I'll be on the lookout for that as well. I'd like to know what they did with pages that didn't have equivalents on the new domain. Having worked on an eCommerce site we just relaunched recently, I'm also interested to know how soon traffic normalizes on the new domain after having redirected everything from the old one.

Absolutely! Moz team has certainly done a great job in redirecting all the pages on seomoz.org to moz.com. I still wonder how they permanently redirected facebook.com/seomoz to facebook.com/moz. Did Moz request Facebook to help them on this? Also all the followers they had on twitter.com/seomoz has been moved to twitter.com/moz.

I'm in the middle of a huge battle with a new client that refuses to admit that when they launched their new site (resulting in 3,000+ 404 errors) that the fact that they didn't use 301 redirects has anything to do with their missing traffic. They claim the traffic isn't missing, it's just not being tracked in the .com analytics reports because they moved some things to subdomains. Fine and dandy, but when you link profile takes a nosedive too I think we might want to revisit those 404 errors and get some 301s in place!

Wow... ive been a similar situation in the past. I fixed the issue in question and showed the traffic gains made in the weeks following; they said "No, I think the tracking is just working correctly again" . Good times.

Maybe I am missing something! Obviously, it is best to redirect old URLs to similar content at new URLs. In my opinion, the following line:

"This
means that instead of passing link equity through the 301, Google may
simply drop the old URLs from its index without passing any link equity
at all."

actually makes the case to redirect old URLs, that you don't have good URLs to redirect to, to at least your homepage. If search engines drop the old URLs then that would happen if you didn't redirect them anyways. You will at least get any referral traffic if any sites had linked to the old URL and you may at least get some extra traffic until the URL drops from the search indexes.

You should also remember the users - if you don't have a relevant page any more then you should redirect to a page that explains that to the user. Then they don't get frustrated looking for something that is no longer there or wonder why they keep landing on the home page.

Keep the users happy and most of the time you'll keep the engines happy.

Great article Cyrus. It's interesting to see not only how 301s are being contextualized by search engines, but also 302s. Seems like its a plus that search engines are trying to clean up our mistakes for us, but also could lead to losing some control on how we redirect our pages. I guess we'll have to wait and see!

I read a great Moz article on cleaning up tags and categories last month. I decided to clean up my site using what I learned, implemented a new more efficient category and tag structure, used 301 redirects to appropriately channel users to the correct content, and saw my site traffic plummet from 2,000+ per day to 200 per day. Moral of the story ... BE CAREFUL, using redirects can absolutely kill your site. My hope is that, in the long run, having a more efficient site will give me a long term boost in traffic and enhance the user experience. However, in the short term, it REALLY sucks ;-(

I don't think there is anything bad with 301 redirects as Cyrus mentioned that it transfer traffic and link juice. The only problem may be doing it incorrectly or something went wrong in the transition. Maybe double checking everything to ensure 301 redirect is implemented correctly.

Yea this article is DEFINITELY bookmark worthy. It's amazing how many people think 301ing a bunch of unrelated pages is going to help rank. I am constantly fighting the battle to "Let the pages die" but clients refuse to let it go as they feel there has to be someway to trick google and keep that page equity.

The biggest problem is Panda and Penguin changed the rules of the game and many companies refuse to believe it and just want to do more of the same techniques that got them penalized in the first place...

"When done properly, we know from testing and statements from Google that a 301 redirect passes somewhere around 85% of its original link equity."

Don't let Michael Martinez catch you saying unprovable, untestable non-sense like this. :) Otherwise, nice work on a clear basic guide on redirects, and the comment on the interesting developments around 302 behavior. You could also add that you can apparently 301 anything you want to a YouTube video to improve it's rankings with no fear at all. Perhaps prompting some exploration into how much domain authority can protect you from bad links?

I wonder why there is a punishment to those who are upgrading their site/page(s) to meet the ever-evolving specs for an ideal website? You can play it safe and lose juice, or take chances using a 301 and lose juice. It seems like a no-win situation!

301 Redirects have always made me quite nervous. Thanks for the article Cyrus. This clears up quite a few concepts for me. My website is small but it seems that redirects happen and knowing the best way to make sure not to mess it up a major plus.

So true! When doing redirects I first like to contact sites that are linking to my content (at least the good ones) :) and ask if they can change their URL to fit the new URL. I have found that to make the best case scenario. When all else fails a proper 301 can really help!

As a begginer In SEO I found this article so clear and very helpfull! Many thanks!

I would like to make a question about it. If I have a couple of webpages in, lets say for example blogspot, and I am now creating a serious new webpage with the same general topic but not the same content, would you suggest to have 301 from that blogs? I don't know if google would take it in a dramatic way!

You can either export your content to your new website and do a canonical to tell engines that this is the original copy. Redirect works too and as Cyrus mentioned in his article above, the content you directing to doesn't have to be 100% the same. As long as it is relevant or similar to the old page should be good.

Good stuff Cyrus, Matt Cutts actually did mention at SMX that 301 redirecting everything to a single page (the home page usually) for mobile users is a sign of bad UX, which might lose you a few ranking spots on mobile searches.

Guess there's a good analogy for doing same thing when moving your site to a new domain, as you mentioned.

I went through exactly that. 301 redirected too many times and moving to two new domains. As a result ended up losing 60% of my traffic. Now working to recover that traffic. My mistake was writing the redirect codes after the move was already done so I didn't have as much time to prepare a thorough robots.txt file.

One question we don't know the answer to is if it's possible to reverse the effect of a bad 301. Meaning, if Google treats your redirect as a 404, is it possible to make the page relevant again if you stop the redirect?

Many webmasters have stories of losing rankings after redirecting a page too many times, and its possible search engines just ignore them after awhile.

That said, if you feel redirecting back to relevant category pages would be better for the user, by all means I would do so.

Before the advent of soft-404 pages in Google Webmaster we used to redirect all old URLs to the home page when a website was upgraded to a new framework/system. The thinking was that the visitor should not get a broken page and at least should see the home page from which he would be able to browse the rest of the website. After the advent of soft-404 pages in Google Webmaster and a lot of brainstorming we realized our mistake and now put 301 rules in place for old URLs to be directed to the new URLs.

A must read article for a web developer involved in website upgrade and URL redirection.

One other way that will also completely ruin them: having a no-index tag blocking the old url .

A client changed their backend-system which also resulted in a new URL-structure. All redirects was setup correctly but the robots.txt which came with the new site blocked all URLs with parameters in them (dunno why). Unfortunately some of the old URLs did used parameters. That made crawlers ignore the redirect, and well let just say that they lost some important positions.

Let Suppose someone buy 5 different domains and each domain have quality links and also in good positions and one day site owner redirect all 5 websites on one 1 website what does this impact on search engines?

I'm assuming that, unless there is relevance in the backlink profile the impact on rankings of redirecting on mass will offer limited benefits unless tightly in line with the site the redirect is redireted to

What about a site (that I currently own and operate) that houses real estate listings for both US and Canada. Currently, both US and CA properties are housed under the .com. We've been thinking, lately, to push our Canada properties over to our .ca (which currently has nothing on it; just 301's to our .com), and do a 301 redirect of all Canada pages/content from the .com to the exact replica on the .ca. So, Toronto, ON on the .com would 301 to the exact same Toronto, ON page on the .ca. The design, layout, content, info, etc., would be identical on the .ca as it is on the .com. Every page that we move to the .ca would not change whatsoever. Straight replica.

We're just worried that the .com is doing so well that this could cause us to take a massive hit in our Canadian market.

Reason for our thoughts on doing this would be to specifically geo-target our Canadian content on the .ca with both the .ca and Google WMT. And the same with the .com (which would then be strictly US content).

Down the road, I'm sure, this would be the best-case setup. But is the ability to geo-target a specific domain really worth it? Would the 301's in this case do more harm than good?

I don't think 301 redirect will hurt your sites in this case. You are actually passing traffic and link juice from your .com site's CA section to your.ca site. If everything is relevant, I don't think there is any harm.

If you want to do that then you have similar niche websites then its possible otherwise you lose your link juice and quality of sites and secondly I think you may know about co-citation, it also helpful for your sites.

Thanks for the awesome post. If I have some links that contain low quality content but are related to other posts on my site, would a 301 work here? Could a noindex + nofollow erase any poison link juice?

These are old posts from when I just started on the site. They have are linked to from other domains so I don't want to delete them, but feel it would be better to redirect a visitor to the updated versions of the post. What do you suggest?

If I have lets say 4 old version websites that all have between 20-29 authority. And 1 website that has 42 authority. (They are all about the same topic and in fact about the same company). Now if I (301) redirect all 4 old websites page by page to the new corresponding pages how will that affect the authority of the website with authority 42. I am asking because I am concerned that because the other have lower authority this might damage my current authority.

I don't want people to visit the old websites. So should I carefully redirect (and my authority will not suffer a drop) or just delete the webpages.

P.S. The old websites have all more relevant domain names then the new one (Its like Canon would also have old domains named digitalcameras.com or pinters.com ...etc.)

Hi Cyrus, about one year ago I bought a new domain and I did 301 redirection to each url and home page from my old domain to the new one and everything worked perfect, I kept all my links, positions, traffic and page rank, in about 3 months, everything was pass to my new domain. 3 weeks ago I was changing the template of the new site and I deactivate 301 redirections to run all the test of the new template in the old domain. I kept the new domain without redirection for about 2 weeks and then I reactive 301 redirection, as a result, the new domain disappeared from the first google page were I was in several keywords and I lost about 80 % of my traffic. Do you think taking off 301 redirection for 2 weeks was the reason to loose all this rank and do you know how to fix it or do you think I just have to wait. Thanks !!

I have site with over 3000 old urls that we really don't mind losing their traffic, we just don't feel it is worth the effort to use 301 since the traffic is really minimal at best. The question is, does large number of 404's affect a site?, answer from anyone Cyrus or anyone else will be highly appreciated.

Best tip I can give for newbie webmasters/small businesses is to definitely consult with someone who knows what they're doing.

I've personally operated a few websites, and have had a little difficulty implementing them properly. I have just enough technical know how to want to do it myself, but I'd recommend to anyone else like this to definitely consult with someone who's implemented 301's successfully before.

Great, informative article, Cyrus! Definitely some great info, like not 301ing all of your old pages to the home page.

I know of some sites who have their sitemap in their 404s so this could be really helpful in keeping your users on your site when you really don't have a page relevant enough to do a 301 redirect. You would basically be saying, "Sorry this page no longer exists, but check out the great pages that we do have on our site."

I am moving an HTML site to a Joomla revision of the site (long overdue) and want to be sure that I not only create a better user experience, better site structure, but most importantly that the redirects from old pages to the new related ones work. We have related articles on certain subjects (not at all identical, but different perspectives), but I want to consolidate and drop the older articles, since "freshness" and "social signals" often seem so important these days to the detriment of evergreen content.

My question is, should I drop thousands of older articles (even if there is some good content in them) and redirect to newer pages, and will the fact that the site has fewer pages hurt the rankings? I know this is general, but our SEO moztrust is very high versus competitors, but we have far fewer internal links, which I think helps bring down the mozrank.

It's a complex issue, and I don't want to be glib by giving you a short answer in a comment when a longer, in depth examination is warranted. That said, my motto is to not redirect unless you have a very good reason. Don't fix what's not broken. If you can find a way to update your pages without redirection, that would be ideal. But this isn't always possible.

Many programmers have extensive knowledge of redirecting websites. Yet how effective is this really? One of them is the standard 301 redirect. The webmaster faces the hurdle that as soon as a certain number of URLs change, he must redirect everything. To ensure this does not end in virtual chaos there are some important facts which require urgent attention.

Redirecting using 301 and 302 are not in principle identical. It does mean, however, that with each 301 redirect valuable link juice is lost. How can this be prevented?

How much link juice is really lost through a 301 redirect from a root page is not always the same. A practical example would be if one would like to place an article on the root page but this is also indexed as an alias or homepage. In this case one must simply use a 301 redirect to link the index with the homepage. However, this is not always possible and much more sophisticated processes are necessary through which as a percentage a greater amount of link juice gets lost than planned. According to experts, this is usually a fictitious value which is hard to measure in real figures and facts.

But it is a fact that the loss of link juice through a 301 redirect can be significant. Professional web specialists advise not to make successive rows of 301 redirects. This results in a major loss of link juice which has extremely disadvantageous effects on search engine rankings.

Well placed domains which have existed for years have good link juice. This can be lost through making changes which is a complete waste. For this reason one should organise and plan well a switch or 301 redirect in order to continue to benefit from the already existing link juice.

Many thanks Saifrizvi for your thoughtful reply and response, which I will take into account.

The reality is that 10-15 year-old sites using ancient non-interactive technology and hand-carved CMS's are so hard to maintain that a switchover to a modern CMS is often necessary in order to generate the kind of "freshness" and "user experience" that is now demanded by search engines and users, among many other factors.

I don't see any way out of this dilemma, and see major sites make conversions from .asp or .php to a CMS, for example, all the time. Most seem to recover. Of course the recovery time can be a question of branding these days, as none of us know what goes into valuation as the search engine algorithms change so incredibly rapidly.

I fully expect loss of link juice, but have to counter the loss of that juice with the huge apparent penalties we are incurring on some older sites due to the technology used which was built to provide resource information (when non-interactive software was the rule and the web was a research tool primarily) to highly interactive community sites with endlessly fresh and high quality content as is now demanded. I worry that the coming generation will all have A.D.D.!

Moz thinks our sites are great compared to our competitors. One search engine does not these days...

It is a bind, but one must proceed, even with caution. I was just asking about the types of experiences others have had with regard to how to implement the 301 when staying on the same domain and switching to a modern CMS.

In the end, you can only build the best site possible with an eye to the future, which seems to become the present in nanoseconds.

Please, can you advise me whether I should insert on Youtube videos the links like thesite.com/twitter and make 301 redirect to my twitter page, is it ok or not? Or shall I create a new thesite.com/twitter page with help of iframe sections.

Practically, one of our website fallen down in ranking and we have redirected all old URLs to new one just like seomoz to moz recently with 301. Drastically, we have noticed improvement in ranking and traffic also.

Thanks for clarifying the things between 301 and 302 redirection. Its very helpful for me. but i would like to know more about 404 and 410 re directions also as they are almost similar to each other. hope listen you soon on these re directions also.

Great article. I am in a similar boat to a previous writer who took the opportunity when migrating our decade old site to a new platform to clear out hundreds of low traffic tags, categories & pages. And yes, we did end up in robust debate with our web guru about which should be redirected, where they should go (I argued for an item by item and not a blanket redirect), which should be let die a natural death (there's more than a few of those) and how many notes from Google about increased not found errors was a bad thing (and whether or not 404 errors really were discounted in SEO). My takeaway is that most web developers could use a briefing sheet based on your infographic when talking through site architecture with their clients - it would solve a lot of debates.

Thank you for the information. It's very thorough but there is still something I'm wondering about: After the redirects are completed, is it a good idea to ask the people who link to you, to change their links towards the new url? Since you lose about 84% percent of your link juice, maybe this can help to repair the damage?

Hi. I want to consolidate two websites. I understand how to redirect internal pages. My concern is this: What is best practice for redirecting homepage? If I do 301 redirect of homepage directly from godaddy, will that supersede all internal page redirects and cause all pages to go to new homepage?

I am managing the seo of an eshop, www.1sexshop.gr [NSFW] and the last 2 days i noticed a big change in serps for some keywords. The seo is going on google.gr for 5 keywords and the eshop is based on magento 1.7.

Before 5 days, i set up ssl certificate in the eshop in order to get better ranking results. I setup the ssl and followed the instructions from the magento to make permantetly 301 redirects from the http urls to the https.

When i saw in serps that the rankings for some keywords going up-down, i checked some urls to see if all going well with 301 redirects and found that the redirects where 302 and not 301, its a big bug from magento.

I solved the problem from the htaccess but still the rankings for the home page have dissapeared. I fetched again site from webmaster tools an i am waiting to see.

I have a 301 redirect from an old domain to a new domain. The old domain has domain authority of 42 and homepage has page authority of 52. My new domain has domain authority of 24 and page authority of 33. When I run the redirect through every online redirect checker I can find, it says it is a 302. I know I made it a 301. Any ideas of how this could have happened?

hi, i have another problem. My keywords ranking to my homepage. They are ranking very well. But I have for every keyword another page that is better optimized. Is there a solition for. When somebody is searching for somerhing my page with that keyword will opening insteadnof homepage

Curious who will read my comment on this 4 year old blog, but worth the try: we are discontinueing a ccTLD for a large e-commerce site (4.000+ pages) and want to redirect all to our .com. Is it wise to do so?

According to our webdev there's no functionality which creates automated/ identified relationships between the many pages, so all must be redirected to .com homepage

Hi there Pascal-Omoda, I'll read your comment! ;) It is true, however, that comments on older blog posts like this don't often receive an answer. I'd actually suggest you head on over to the Q&A forum if you'd like some input from SEO experts around the world -- you can post your question there, and people will do their best to crowdsource an answer for you. I hope that helps a little bit, and thank you for reading and commenting!

This article is trely awesome! I have a query, my website has www url and non www url so I will redirect it, but the each page has www and non www url. so in this case what should I do? Do I need to do only home page or all the pages 301 redirection.Please suggest. Thanks .

I am working for a ecommerce portal they recently did a 301 redirect, however I think that it was not required. The situation was as follows: the earlier category pages url was"www.xyx.com/homedecor" they then changed the url to"www.xyz.com/homedecor/cat_list" and did a 301 redirect to all the urls and both these urls were indexed in google, first was done earlier and the other later.

This was done for tracking.

Hence i told them that we should not change internal urls unnecessarily and 301 redirect should be used only in special scenarios.

Cyrus, if you come to Brasil people would recognize you in the streets, we love you down here!! Great content! The pictures make it very easy to understand the concept, but it is hard for me to take action before my question. I'm sorry to post this question after 7 months of this post being live, but I need some help from you.

Long story short we decided to duplicate our site 5x into 5 new domains (grow to different regions in Brasil) but we do not blocked these sites from Google crawl while we were re-writing pieces of it to focus on new locations (worse newbie mistake ever?). This happened 21 days previous from Penguim 2.1 release and we used same hosting provider (hostgator), same whois, content and theme for all new 5 domains. Bottom line our site #1 dropped to page 10, and regarding the new sites they didn't even had a chance to grow in SERP coz we decided to block them as soon as site #1 was algo-penalised.

In order to make the call to block all new sites, we used the Pixelgroove penalty checker (I am aware it's not an accurate tool - but it was what we had at that moment) and all sites queries at Pixelgroove returned positive for penalties. I strongly believe that site #1 was not hit by badlinks, we believe it was a duplicate content or a multiple sites algo-penalty (no messages in any site's GWT). All 5 other sites we can't actually know what the penalty was or even if a penalty ever took place.

Now we have our site #1 still tanked in SERPs and we own 5 domains with a strong links build to it (before all this happen we got in touch with all our content syndicators and they did brilliant job spreading our content and getting good links) but they still blocked coz we don't know what to do next.

Should we set up a fresh domain, with new unique content and redirect the 5 new domains to it? All same niche and formats.

Redirection to correct and specific page is must to avoid unwanted result in future not only for blog reader but also for Google. I have permanently redirect (301 redirect) http://www.tiploot.com/ to www at first which causes some unwanted result in Google. search.

Thanks for great article and it completely solves my hidden questions.

Does the 301 redirect pass along the age of the site? For example, I have numerous sites but have decided to consolidate them into one site. Some are a decade old. Am I correct if I 301 redirect I lose any benefit that would be assigned to older sites?

What happens if I turn the 301 off and go back to having multiple sites instead of one big site?

I'm setting up a site right now. It is a kind of rich directory site with 4000 current posts. I will take about a year to set up the content and so in the meantime I would like to redirect the empty pages to a single page. (Probably around 20-30 posts redirected to the same page at a time).

The problem is that the site is about a week old currently and is already ranking for literally thousands of keywords even with no or little content.

What is the best way to do this?

I can link to geographically similar pages and so user experience will be retained for the most part. I don't want to drop any rankings while I'm setting up the site though. FYI the pages will have content put on them as they are rented by Clients.

I am a real newbie and wish I had read this before migrating the same URL from Wordpress to Weebly without first doing 301's or better still -- paying a real webmaster to do it. After publishing the un-redirected Weebly site it completely disappeared from Google and now that it's back its lost serious ranking. I was told by my host that it was "too late" to initiate re-directs (which I was about to have them do) and that I would need to "start over" building my organic rank up the hard way. It took me five years to build my small business along with my site ranking. Is it too late to do re-directs after the new version of the site has been out there for two weeks? Sorry for the long explanation.

Never thought about 301 a labrador page to a tacco site :)I only redirect my old stuff together like - i think rand wrote - redirect the old post of the same topic to the most relevant or new one. Maybe in a better url - so i will start with it just today so i read this and thought - wow how could he now what i am planning todo...

All what you need to know about 301 in a small post - see you next time

"If the page is no longer relevant, receives little traffic, and a better page does not exist, it’s often perfectly okay to serve a 404 or 410 status code."

How long would you expect these 404s to drop out of the index? We underwent a rebrand in February where I took the opportunity to cull large amounts of low quality/traffic pages. I did not 301 these pages as we just wanted rid, but I am still getting "Increase in not found errors" in webmaster tools. I would have expected these pages to have been discounted by now.

The "not found" errors in Webmaster Tools are normal, and shouldn't cause too much concern. It's typical to see these reported for months. That said, you want to make sure you aren't accidentally linking to these pages (or external links as well) which will cause search engines to keep looking for them, and also represents a loss of link equity as well.

To speed the process, you can serve a 410 (gone) instead of a 404.

Another option is to use Google's Removal URL feature in Webmaster Tools.

So I 301'd an old dead site of mine that was completely unrelated to my current one. It had no bad links and I was closing the site. Am I safe to just do a crappy '301 everything to my new homepage'? Is it a good idea?

I have suffered from rankings being dropped due to changing my site architeture, and making simple mistakes with 301's.

My personal approach now, it to plan out my architecture fully and carefully before I build and upload any website, minimising the need for 301's. Then I ensure that I only re-direct URLs if I absolutely need to, and I practise extreme caution when I do.

Thanks for the post nice information as always keep up the Good work hope to write a blog soon with all the information I have learnt here in the last year .I need to learn to be more creative and write something that's never been written before is a challenge and take extensive research and creativity.

Great content and Great timing! I am just doing some redirects on my page. I have several pages that are a bit outdated, they have been replaced with more modern content somewhere in my website, because they are no longer relevant. Would this be correct?. I am scared in a post penguin world, so i am being very cautious with redirects and links. Thanks in advance!

+1 Cyrus "301 redirects have the power to
clean up messy architecture, but when done wrong can be disastrous." Google Webmaster Tool's reports Crawl Errors and can assist in which URL's need redirects. Thank you for sharing!

I am a little confused when to use properly a 301. Is it OK to implement it when I have two pages which are semantically similar? Also there would be the same video on those pages? Would I avoid duplicate content in this way? The post is perfect today as this question haunted me all day. Thanks a lot, Sonia

Sonia, to answer your question: yes, if the pages are duplicate, it's best to either 301 redirect them or add canonical tags. This is a huge subject. A couple of articles that may get you started:http://moz.com/learn/seo/canonicalization

This is a great article, what about doing a 301 from 10 sites with EMD's to 10 new pages under one brand? The EMD's currently rank... However, there link profiles are branded naturally (Exact Keyword = Brand).. If we 301 them will they still appear branded to the search engines? or will they now appear unnatural?

I have done revamp of many of our in-house and client websites and all of them were successful. But after reading this post I came to know about the mistake (i.e: bulk redirect to home page) which I have done to all of these sites. Most of them I redirected to respected 100% relevant pages but which are not 100% relevant I redirected to homepage.

Thanks for this clear statement:

"Google may go a step further and treat bulk redirects to the home page of a website as 404s, or soft 404s at best.

This means that instead of passing link equity through the 301, Google may simply drop the old URLs from its index without passing any link equity at all."

Now I will defiantly take care about this things when I do it in the future.

"Danger: 301 redirects and bad backlinks" - this portion will definitely help me to take proper precautions before start cleaning up some bad backlinks we accrued, Thanks for being informative as always !

Thanks. It was really interesting and informative as well.
I used to watch Matt's videos so was aware of many of stuffs. But I like the point of massive redirection of URLs to home page URL. Most of the SEO when do not find related page usually redirect it to home page with 301 or just to save themselves from putting extra efforts. I think they must get this in account that it might can harm.

I think it is better to do a 301 redirect (even if it does not exactly match the semantic field) to leave a page 404. I would do my tests concerning the repetition of 302. There surely has something to exploit ... :-)

Interesting about the 302's as I don't tend to use them. Also interesting about the 404's, I was worried about these as I didn't think the search engines liked them. One of my clients has a website full of redundant pages and unrelated low quality blogs. Ideally I just want to remove them from the site as they don't serve any purpose for his customers.

Thanks Cyrus, I was somewhat confused about both 301 & 302 redirects! This article is really an insightful article and now many of confusions about 301 & 302 redirects are crystal clear. Again thanks :)

Great explanation of 301 redirects.. I have been advocating against the practice of redirecting every 404 to home page from couple of years, thanks for including that topic in your post, Im sure my boss cant question you at least, he has to accept it. Anyways, I've one question for you: There has been an argument that redirecting a penalized domain will not affect the new domain because it will allow spammers to hurt any website they want, negative SEO i mean. What are your thoughts on that?

Do you have a tip for finding 301s that aren't obvious? For example, I use the Redirection plugin in WordPress but maybe there is a 301 floating around somewhere that I don't know about. (not in my .htaccess either)

I'm sure folks smarter than myself have better solutions, but I often do a top-level crawl with Screaming Frog, or check the top links in Open Site Explorer, which both will give a surface level view of 301s and other redirects.

A timely post given that we are in the process of redeveloping one of our sites and the lazy option could have been to redirect the bulk of old URLs to the home page. Didn't realise the importance of redirecting to directly related pages.